China Mobile's effort to support its own mobile operating system to compete with the likes of Apple's iPhone appears to be falling by the wayside, mired by its failure to attract developers and enough backing from handset manufacturers.The operating system, originally called the Open Mobile System, but better known as the OPhone OS, began appearing on China Mobile smartphones in 2009. The operating system is based on Google's Android, but was localized for the Chinese market, and incorporated features to connect to the carrier's services.China Mobile, which now has 672 million customers, had wanted to offer a wide-range of OPhone devices at a time when the country was just beginning to off[...]

Popular digital magazine app Flipboard is getting some attention from Google in the form of Google+ API support, the company announced today at the Le Web 2012 conference in London.The support will give Flipboard users access to content streams from the search giant’s social network. The stream will give you access to things like Google+ updates/posts, photos, videos, and other data without having to visit the social network directly. Google+ is hardly the only social network to integrate with the digital magazine — support for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and others is already available. The news of the Google+ stream does comes as a bit of a surprise, though, because[...]

A greedy patent troll that has already bagged Apple, Cisco and many other Silicon Valley firms is heading back to Texas to demand Facebook and others pay up for including a spam filter in their email systems.The company first made headlines in 2010 when it sued 36 companies over US Patent�6018761, claiming that�”E-mail as we know it would essentially stop working if it weren’t for [the] invention.” Like others of its ilk, the firm has a name — “InNova” — that conveys technology even though it is just a shell company that does nothing but file lawsuits.The patent itself was issued in 2000, four years before Facebook launched, and covers a�?System fo[...]

If 2012 turns out to be the year when the online privacy economy really takes off, then the “private social network”, EveryMe is likely to become one of the big new stories in Silicon Valley. Formed a year ago in Menlo Park out of the Y Combinator stable, EveryMe now boasts $1.5 million in start-up capital and over 500,000 users of its “circles” (heard that one before, eh?) product which is available as both Android and iPhone apps. As co-founder Vibhu Norby told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, EveryMe was originally founded as an address book company but “pivoted” to a private social network when it became obvious that the world was “[...]

What do you get for the site that sells everything? A UK expansion via acquisition, of course!Yes, design flash-sale phenom Fab.com is celebrating the end of its first full year in business, and part of that celebration is the purchase of Llustre.com, a bold-faced Fab clone in the UK. You’ll now find the Llustre team doing business as UK.Fab.com.If you’re feeling a bit of deja vu, you may recall that Fab recently expanded into Europe in much the same way when it acquired German Fab clone Cassandra.de just a few months ago.We’ve long known that international expansion was a big part of Fab’s plans for 2012. So, when we saw on Facebook that Fab.com founder Jason Gold[...]